ZERO1 Blog

Public space, place to place connections using emerging global communication technology for a greater common good. I’ve been searching the web for projects and works that bring these together. Do send along suggestions for projects (my zero1 email). A few from what I’ve gathered thusfar follow:

• Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good at the Chicago Cultural Center from May 24 to September 1, 2013. Organized by Cathy Lang Ho and in affiliation with the New York Institute for Urban Design, an event and series of works that focus on the city and public space. From the curator: “Our goal is to use the exhibition as a framework for understanding a larger movement, in which citizens all over the world are devising and implementing clever, low-barrier urban interventions to make their cities more inclusive, sustainable, pleasurable, and safer...we have organized a rich roster of programs that will place the trend of tactical urbanism in the context local urban issues and citizen action.”

ZERO1 is one of 14 semi-finalists in the ArtsFwd Business Unusual National Challenge. We need your vote to push us to the finals and reach the crowdsourcing round, where an exciting “crowd” of big thinkers and leaders will contribute bold ideas and feedback to ZERO1’s adaptive challenge of establishing the ZERO1 Garage as an interface to engage Silicon Valley companies. Ultimately ZERO1 aims to be a new model for the arts that utilizes private/ public collaborations and invigorate the cultural scene in Silicon Valley through social practice/ public art projects.

Every vote counts! Support us by voting once a day, every day, until May 31 to help us reach the next round as a Finalist! Cast your vote!

Experience designer and ZERO1 Biennial artist Nelly Ben Hayoun, the International Space Orchestra (ISO), and BECK will be performing tonight to a sold out crowd at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall for ‘Song Reader’ Issue by POP-UP MAGAZINE and MC SWEENEY’S. Blending space science, planet-poking and bluegrass-playing spacecraft operators, the world’s first orchestra composed of space scientists.

As my concept for a web platform for social practice artists and other forces aimed at social change takes shape, my attention also goes to what may help us better understand some aspects of intervening in the social arena.

To start, what happens when social practice artists approach communities:

How do they relate to the current global economic system while aiming at empowering groups and villages?

What kind of philosophy do they espouse while enabling poor or marginal communities to move as positive agents in their daily lives?

Do they oppose the free market rules or do they go with it; is there even a third possibility...

How do we assess their strategies vis-à-vis the difference in histories and traditions in different geographical areas?